B.C. is rolling out a new housing program to reduce costs and speed construction times by making prefabricated kit designs for small apartment complexes more accessible and affordable.
Developers will be able to create designs through an online platform that also allows builders to access local zoning regulations. This creates a one-stop shop to design a code-approved building.
The province has dubbed the program Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing, or DASH. It is open source and free to use for B.C. developers.
“It brings together everything that builders, developers, architects and manufacturers need to create homes,” Housing Minister Christine Boyle said on Thursday, Nov. 20, in a press conference launching the program.
The program lead is former Victoria mayor Lisa Helps. She explained that the ultimate goal is to help shift the residential construction industry from most of the building being done on site to the majority of it being done in factories.
Helps compared it to IKEA furniture, saying that all the parts of the buildings would be factory-built, and come as a kind of kit to be assembled by skilled trades at the worksite.
She said initial calculations from the federal government predict it could reduce costs by about 20 per cent. Helps reckons it will take five to seven years for cost savings to be fully realized.
“Our hope is, as DASH rolls out across B.C., that all manufacturers are manufacturing the same roof and floor panels, the same balconies, so they’re really easy to sub in, and they become these standards that we can all work from,” Helps said.
The platform is being launched as a prototype, and Helps said there is room for input, feedback and testing as it is rolled out.